Cannibals (22 page)

An unrepentant cannibal who munched on two girls during his tour of duty in Vietnam

Arthur Shawcross boasted that he was never happier than when he was serving his tour of duty in Vietnam. He claimed to have killed women and children indiscriminately while fighting for his country. Not only did he torture, mutilate, and dismember his victims, he also roasted their flesh for his dinner.

Arthur John Shawcross was born on June 6, 1945, two months premature, to Corporal Arthur Roy and Bessie Shawcross. Bessie took her newborn to her sister-in-law’s in Watertown, New York, and remained there until her husband had completed his military service.

Many of the Shawcross family already lived in and around the Watertown district, but unfortunately Arthur found it hard to interact with other people. He tried various ways of attracting attention, and up until the age of six still talked in baby talk. He became a chronic bed wetter and his chiding by family members only seemed to make the matter worse. In an effort to get the attention of his mother, Arthur started to run away from home but would either return of his own accord or be brought back by the authorities.

Sadly, Arthur’s school life was no better than his home, as the other children teased him constantly which meant he spent many hours on his own. His grades suffered and he always felt like he was a misfit. In an effort to gain recognition with the older children he started to bully the younger children, but apart from reducing his victims to tears, it had little of the desired effect. Around this time Arthur also developed a violent temper, and, if provoked, would fly into an uncontrollable rage. He also took to carrying an iron bar around with him.

As the months went by Arthur became more and more withdrawn and his grades suffered because he fell so far behind in his school work. At home he also became more introverted and to avoid further punishment due to his appalling school reports, Arthur would often escape to his grandmother’s house.

Arthur Shawcross had an obsession about sex from about the age of eight, and can never remember a time when his mind was not preoccupied with sexual thoughts. He spent many hours masturbating and then progressed into oral sex with friends of both sexes. He also claims that his sex was not just limited to humans, and he experimented with animals, such as cows, sheep, a horse and also killed a chicken whilst in the process of having intercourse with it.

Arthur had an ‘Aunt’ Tina, who he said introduced him to the delights of oral sex, and from this experience he always found it to be the most rewarding form of sexual gratification. Arthur claimed to have been regularly having oral sex with his sister Jeannie and his cousin Linda by the time he was 14.

Soon Arthur’s desire for oral sex became insatiable and he would perform it whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself. However, something happened one day on his way home from school, which was to change his view of sex forever. Arthur was walking down the road when a car stopped and offered him a lift. The man driving the car took them to a secluded spot and held a knife to the boy’s throat as he performed fellatio on him. However, being so frightened, Arthur was unable to obtain an erection which made the man angry. He turned Arthur over and brutally sodomized him before dropping him back to his house. From this point on Arthur was unable to reach an orgasm unless there was some form of pain involved.

For the next four years Arthur became something of a waster and seemed unable to hold a job down for very long. He also took to stealing on a small scale for which he was occasionally caught.

In 1964 Arthur got married, but the relationship was only to last for about four years, although the couple did produce one son.

It seems as though the turning point came in Arthur Shawcross’s life when he was conscripted into the army and was posted to Vietnam. This became a significant period in his life because he was trained to kill, something which seemed to give him an unexpected thrill. Shortly before leaving for Vietnam, Arthur married for the second time to Linda Neary, following a very brief courtship.

Arthur was given the job of despatch clerk when he arrived at Vietnam, which made him responsible for flying out to the various war zones in a helicopter carrying ammunition. Initially he found he was horrified by the atrocities and savagery of war, but soon became very keen to join his fellow soldiers in the fighting. He seemed to enjoy the thrill of hunting down his enemy and playing the part of a predator.

Soon the horrors of the conflict brought out his bloodlust and he soon started to commit his own atrocities. On one occasion he found two Vietnamese women hiding in the bushes, and he told of how he shot one in the head and tied the other to a tree. Although the first woman was still breathing he cut off her head and put it on top of a pole for his enemy to find. Next, feeling the urge to eat human flesh, he took a slice from her thigh, cooked it and then sat down and ate it. He forced the second woman to perform oral sex on him, then he raped her and shot her in the head.

Vietnam became a real-life story of horror and bloodlust for Arthur, and he was later reported to have said that the war and its barbarity brought out the animal instinct in him. When he was eventually interrogated he said he felt he was justified in what he did because:

‘The VC put razor blades up whores’ vaginas. Shoved them inside a deep cut in where you’d never know until it was too late. When the GI’s would fuck ‘em they would slit their penises to shreds or cut them clean off . . . I was with some guys, ROK Koreans, who took a whore and put a firehose inside her and turned on the water. She died almost instantly. Her neck jumped about a foot from her body. Another time we took another whore and tied her to two small trees, legs to the trees, bent down. She had a razor blade inside her vagina. She was cut from her anus to her chin. Then the trees were let go. She slit in half. Left her there hanging between the trees. This may be why I did what I did to those girls.’

Following the Vietnam war and back at home with his wife, Arthur found it impossible to settle back into a normal routine. He constantly had visions of his blood-soaked orgies back in Vietnam and started to believe that he was possessed by the spirit of a 13th-century cannibal named ‘Ariemes’. He felt that he was being driven to rape and murder and commit more acts of cannibalism. He started to beat Linda and was becoming more and more aggressive as the weeks went by.

His wife consulted a psychiatrist who made an assessment of Arthur, and the doctor told Linda that her husband needed to be committed for treatment and rest. However, Linda was a Christian Scientist and did not believe the doctor and subsequently refused to sign the papers for Arthur’s committal. However, without the therapy that he desperately needed, Arthur’s mental state started to decline and eventually he was driven to murder once again.

In 1972 Arthur Shawcross murdered ten-year-old Jack Blake and eight-year-old Karen Hill, in Watertown, New York. The children’s bodies were discovered only a few days apart and Arthur was arrested for the murders. He was sentenced to 25 years and was released on parole in April 1987 after having served only 15 years.

After his release Arthur eventually settled in Rochester, after residents in two other communities objected to his presence due to his sinister past.

Whilst in Rochester Arthur married Rose Whalley who was his third wife. However, around the same time he met a woman called Clara Neal, who became his mistress. Arthur lived in the centre of town and worked at night as a food processor. He didn’t own a car and could often be seen riding a woman’s bicycle along the banks of the Genesee River, a favourite spot for local fishermen. The people of Rochester weren’t aware of his past and they described him as a friendly and mild-mannered man. Little did they know that around this time Arthur Shawcross saw the return of his old ‘friend’ Ariemes.

In the spring of 1988 women began to disappear from the streets of Rochester, the bodies later turning up in culverts or wooded areas surrounding the city. In March of 1988 the body of a 27-year-old prostitute was found floating in Salmon Creek. In September another body was discovered, and over a year later in October 1989, a third body was found. In early November a fourth, and later the same month a fifth body turned up. Police believed the murders to be the work of the same person, and realized that they had a serial killer loose on the streets of Rochester.

Arthur followed the news of the murders very carefully, and even took the precaution of warning his wife and Clara to be on the lookout. He hung around the local coffee bars and talked to the police about the case.

In late November another body was discovered by a man who was out walking his dog. Four days later another body was found, and by the end of the year three more bodies were added to the list of deaths. The Rochester police felt they needed help to solve this crime, and asked FBI agents who specialized in serial killing to assist in the case.

The FBI’s first job was to make a profile of the killer – white male, thirties, mobile, trusted by women who apparently got into his car without hesitation.

On January 3, 1990, the state police struck lucky when they were doing a helicopter search of a rural area near Rochester. As they circled over the area they saw a body in the icy waters of the Salmon Creek. On a bridge overlooking the creek, a man leaned out of his car and urinated into an empty bottle. The helicopter immediately alerted some patrol cars, who surrounded the area. On spotting the helicopter, Arthur climbed back into Clara Neal’s car and drove off in the direction of the nursing home where she worked.

As soon as he pulled into the parking lot in front of the nursing home, a police car pulled in behind him and he was taken to the police station for questioning. Even though Arthur didn’t really fit the profile constructed by the FBI, when they read up about his past convictions they immediately became suspicious. Through lack of evidence they were forced to let Arthur go, but were able to impound the car for further examination.

During an inspection of the inside of the car they discovered a pink earring that matched one found on one of the victims. Arthur was once again brought in for questioning and for hours he denied any involvement in the crimes. However, he eventually bent under questioning and admitted to killing 11 women since the spring of 1988. He gave them all the gory details and even led the police to two, as yet undiscovered, bodies.

Shocked investigators, and later psychiatrists, listened as Arthur told of how he had cannibalized the vaginas of several of his victims, often returning to the decomposing remains several days later. By the time his case came to trial, in October, Arthur Shawcross refused to testify, and tried to get an insanity claim.

Whilst under hypnosis Arthur spoke as an 11-year-old ‘Arttie’ and even as a reincarnated medieval English cannibal. He was found guilty after an ineffective insanity plea, and was sentenced to ten consecutive terms of 25 years at the Sullivan Correctional Facility. He is still being held at Sullivan and there is no possibility of him ever receiving parole.

On July 10, 1997, Art married his long-time mistress, Clara Neal in a very simple ceremony held in the prison’s visiting room. Arthur’s previous wife, Rose, had died in the spring of that year, which left him free to marry his true sweetheart. Under the state Department of Correctional Services policy Clara and Arthur will be entitled to conjugal visits. Clara says she loves her cannibal husband and will stand by him ‘no matter what’.

Arthur Shawcross was punished with two years in solitary confinement on September 19, 1999, for allowing agents to sell his paintings on the Internet auction site, eBay.

At his trial Armin Meiwes confessed to a lifelong obsession that eventually led him to eating a fellow human being

Germany was gripped by a horror story recently, when a man was arrested for killing and then eating a man he met on the Internet.

Armin Meiwes grew up in a large house in a German town near Kassel with a very domineering mother. His father left when Armin was only eight, and former school friends recall him being publicly ridiculed by his mother. She constantly intruded on his private life, even going as far as accompanying him on dates and to troop outings in the early 1980s when he was in the German army.

As a young boy Armin seemed to have no real friends and spent a relatively secluded life being loyal to his mother. He was constantly lonely and would create stories and even invented a make-believe brother called ‘Franky’ with whom he said he could have proper conversations because he was the only person who listened to him.

At the age of 19 he joined the army but still continued to live at home. He had a real problem interacting with the other recruits, and even when he did want to bring friends back to his house, his mother always made it a problem. He was always unsure of his sexuality, and constantly questioned himself about what his preferences were.

In 1991 he met a group of sailors and was invited to go sailing. This turned out to be his greatest joy – he absolutely loved sailing. In the late ‘80s his mother became bedridden and totally dependent on her son, so when she died in 1999 Armin was thrown completely off balance and didn’t know hope to cope without his powerful mother figure.

After his mother’s death, Armin left the army and went to work as an engineer, and was well respected in the village where he lived. He led an outwardly quiet life and was described by one woman as a ‘friendly and sensitive’ person. He started to frequent a local brothel, and started to fabricate stories about his girlfriends when he was drinking at the bar.

The house he lived in was a very old-fashioned, rather dilapidated farmhouse, and he decided that if he wanted to attract friends back to his house, he would need to do some renovation. He had started to use the Internet at home and was getting interested in a lot of the cannibal chat sites where he found people that said they would like to be eaten. This had always been a fantasy of his since childhood, he knew he wanted to eat human flesh so that that person could become a part of him, just like ‘Franky’. As he read and talked to more and more people with like minds on various websites, Armin decided to post an advertisement on the internet under the alias of Franky and it read:

i search a young boy between 18 and 25 y/o.
Have you a normal body, i butchering you and eat your horny flesh.

Franky

On the outside the house looked perfectly normal and Armin had made it very presentable on the inside as well, putting in bathrooms upstairs so that he could invite friends to stay. But what no one knew about was the ‘slaughter room’ he had constructed which contained a large cage.

His advertisements and photos on the internet had started to attract attention and it wasn’t long before like-minded psychos wanted to see his slaughter room. His fantasies about killing and devouring someone grew stronger and stronger. He would take his new found ‘friends’ to his room, haul them up on a pulley and then mark their bodies with a marker pen, showing the most choice parts to eat. However, so far his guests had been unwilling to go further, that is until he was contacted by Bernd Juergen Brandes, a 43-year-old microchip engineer from Berlin.

Brandes used the name ‘Cator’ on the internet and over the next few months the two of them exchanged numerous explicit e-mails. Eventually they arranged to meet and Brandes made arrangements to come to Armin’s house. Before leaving Berlin, Brandes sold his possessions and wiped clean the hard drive on his computer so that he could not be traced. When he eventually met up with Meiwes at the train station, he said, ‘I am your Cator. I am your flesh’.

That evening, March 9, 2001, the two men sat naked drinking coffee. After a while they climbed the stairs of the rambling old house and went into Meiwes’ bedroom. So as not to experience too much pain, Brandes first swallowed 20 sleeping tablets and drank half a bottle of schnapps. Then, using a kitchen knife Meiwes cut off Brandes’ penis, with his full agreement, and then fried it for them both to eat for their supper.

By this stage Brandes was bleeding heavily and Meiwes talked him into having a bath whilst he read a Star Trek novel. In the early hours of the morning, Meiwes finished off his victim by stabbing him in the neck, but not before kissing him first. Next he chopped up his victim into pieces and put several pieces of him into his freezer – right next to a takeaway pizza. Finally he buried his skull in his back garden.

Over the next few weeks he defrosted pieces of his friend and cooked the flesh in olive oil and garlic. He managed to consume around 20 kg of Brandes’ flesh before the police eventually knocked on his door.

The police were tipped off by several people who had seen his advertisements on the internet. When they started to search Meiwes’ home they found neatly packaged body parts in a freezer in the kitchen. Each package was labelled with the specific body part. In the back garden police found other body parts buried because they were presumed inedible. Meiwes openly admitted to the police that the parts had belonged to Bernd Juergen Brandes who he met on the internet, but said that it wasn’t murder because Brandes had agreed ‘to be slaughtered’.

He told police that the two men had enjoyed a final meal together. Brandes had agreed to be castrated and the two sautéed his penis and testicles, which they washed down with a German white wine. Meiwes also gave the police a video tape he had recorded of the whole procedure. It showed that after the meal Brandes willingly allowed himself to be hanged from a butchers hook and slaughtered just as you would a calf.

During his trial Meiwes testified in his own defence saying that when he ate the body he felt that a part of Brandes was inside him. Investigators on the case discovered that Meiwes had been in internet contact with more than 200 people who shared his fantasies, while the cannibal himself claimed there were thousands more like him.

Armin Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years and six months in prison. Meiwes has said he plans to write his memoirs in order to persuade other people with similar fantasies to seek help before it is too late.